It takes me a minute. “Sorry?”
“Look at you.” She waves her hand. “Nothing gets to you.”
“If you thought I was doing so well,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me they had email?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Jake made William make me promise. So I promised.” She sniffs. “Jake couldn’t stand to think of what it would be like for you if you didn’t get an email you were waiting for, or how much you would worry if he went on an unexpected mission and couldn’t write you for a week. I think he was wrong to do it. I think you would have handled it just fine. You handled everything else.”
“Well.” My hair has grown a few inches in the past months and hangs in my face. I pull and hold it back. “I haven’t really handled it all that well, Denise.”
“So, you broke some knickknacks. Big deal. If you didn’t have at least one day like that I would kill myself.”
She uses the bottom of her shirt to wipe her eyes and says, “Excuse me,” then gets up from the table and follows the hallway to the bathroom. After she closes the door I turn around in my chair to look at myself in the black reflection of one of her artsy posters. I don’t know what she sees.
She comes back with her face washed, damp hairline-hair clinging to her cheeks. “Ignore me,” she says. “Everything is okay. Everything is fine. Things happened they way they were supposed to happen, and they could have been worse. Right?”
I shake my head. I don’t know.
“Right. Right, right, right,” she says. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but I’m glad you lost William’s lighter. If I’d had it, I would have given it to his father, like I told you. But now when you find it, I can keep it. His father doesn’t have to know. I need it, and it’s my right as his wife. Do you think it’s still somewhere in your apartment?”
“I’m sure of it.”
She closes her eyes. “Good.”
I look out the window. There isn’t much to see. A square lawn with no trees, a wire fence separating it from undeveloped land overrun by tangled grass and weeds. Three mourning doves peck around in a clearing a few yards out. “You know,” I say, “I don’t mean to beat this to death, but I can’t let you just think I’m handling everything the way you think I am. I haven’t done well at all.”
“You just don’t think you have.”
I let it go. Maybe she needs me to have handled things.
I ask her, if the movers are coming on Friday, when she’ll be leaving.
“Saturday,” she says. “Bright and early. Or, as William would say, ‘at the ass-crack of dawn.’” She looks out the window again. I wonder if she is thinking it’s also something Brian would say. They all say it.
I tell her she should stop by before then, and she assures me she will. “Friday,” she says.
Before I leave she reminds me to take the case of wine (five bottles are left, and I do the math—she’s been drinking as much as I have), and then to be sure I don’t leave it with her, she carries it to my trunk.
“What’s this?” She uses her chin to point at a gift-wrapped box tucked between the jack and a jug of wiper fluid.
“Co-worker’s birthday tomorrow.”
________
I don’t go straight to Donny’s. Instead, I drive the opposite direction on route seventy-nine past my apartment and follow the road out to nothing. I’ve been this way a few times to pick up fares, but haven’t really explored the highway on my own. Small houses with slanted porches line one side, and on the other, acres of trees are interrupted now and then by patches of red clay where roots have been torn up for a future gas station or strip mall.
The wind feels good on my face, thick and hot as it is, and I don’t turn on the air. I pass cows that don’t look up from their grass, horses tall and still in the shade, a stand-alone pizza place with a full parking lot.
Jake is away—It’ll be a few days again, M. Mission. Miss you. Hope to have an email from you when I get back to a computer. – Jake—and I wonder where. I send a quick safety wish and turn up the radio and think instead about Denise and that she’ll be gone in a few days, not even halfway through the deployment, and that I’ve grown to like her, for whatever reason. She was also the only woman I had. Jake would tell me to contact someone in the Family Readiness Group for companionship, and he would remind me that he already told me before he left that they’re great for information and support. “The last thing I want to do is sit around with a bunch of women and talk about everything,” I told him. You’re doing it to yourself, he would say to any admission of being lonely without Denise. Don’t complain about being by yourself if you’re not going to do anything to change it.
The trees end, and I spot a brown sign announcing the entrance to Fort Donelson. I pull in and drive around until I find the parking lot, then get out of the car and grab a bottle of wine from the trunk and start down the hill.
History, taught as an annoying series of dates to memorize—1492: Columbus. 1773: Boston Tea Party. 1963: Kennedy—always bored me in school. But here, this, a history I can smell, and touch, and…and why I should care about walking the very same trail as a Civil War soldier, I don’t know. (If one of them could read my thoughts, he might say the trail I walk is not their trail at all, not by a long shot.) But here they stood, here they ate and walked and died and laughed and complained about superior officers. Here they lived.
A minivan passes, its occupants pressing faces to the windows while studying a map. This happened here, that happened there. How can they hope to feel it from their air-conditioned pod?
Sweat dampens the pits of my tank top and my hand is slippery around the bottle’s neck. I stuff the wine in a deep overall pocket and pass by a family having a picnic on a trench, blood from the past carnage hidden deep in the soil under their checkered blanket, the scuffle a fifty-word narrative on a pole-mounted marker. I read it, then climb to the top of a different trench, separated from the family by a curve in the path, and stand beside a cannon and close my eyes. I imagine it is February of 1862, cold and bare, trenches active with cannon and gun fire, orders echoing in thin winter air. The men I’d paid little attention to when reading about them in high school stood here, fighting in freezing snow. Union losses numbered two thousand, eight hundred thirty-two, said the marker. Confederates: over sixteen thousand. This piece of land seems too small and too quiet and too green to have seen over nineteen thousand injuries and deaths, all those bodies turning blue in the cold.
I pull a clump of grass from the trench and put it in my pocket.
The next clearing is circled by a path and some benches, and a monument stands alone on a shallow mound. Before climbing up to it, I read the marker positioned at the base of the hill:
BECAUSE THEY HAD FOUGHT AGAINST THE UNITED STATES, CONFEDERATE DEAD WERE NOT REBURIED IN THE NATIONAL CEMETERY. THIS MONUMENT, ERECTED BY THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY IS A MEMORIAL FOR THOSE MEN. IT WAS ERECTED IN 1933.
I notice and ignore the missing comma. So many years later, and still. Still. No wonder Donny is convinced he never came home. These battles don’t end.
I take the stairs to the monument and sit on a bench in the sun. Heat warms my shoulders, my face, my arms, and the worn denim of my overalls cling to my thighs. I stay for a while, at first trying not to mind the heat, but then welcoming the little bit of suffering. Running to my car for the air would be rude, in this place. This park.
A car door slams and jolts me awake. I get up and move on to find a place in the shade where I can open my bottle.
Down the path is an old log cabin, and at the bottom of the slope behind it, a cluster of trees. A good enough place to sit, but to get there I have to go up another hill, this one identified by a marker as a place where more Confederates lie, “Exact grave locations unknown.” The hill is standard for the park: longish faded grass, a shallow incline, and like a trench, but wider, and ending at a line of trees. I stop halfway up when I realize I’m stepping on, essen
tially, graves, but something at the edge of the trees and sitting part in the shadows and part in the sun gets me curious. “Sorry,” I say, tiptoeing. “Sorry, sorry.”
A flower. Just a purple flower, growing alone on the trench.
I reach out to pick it, then rub the petals, press them gently between my thumb and finger.
Better to leave it. It belongs here, the way they do.
The way they did.
I head to the trees behind the cabin and toss the bottle behind a tree. “Bottoms up.” I don’t have a corkscrew, anyway. I lie on my back and look up at the trees and imagine I hear their voices, smell the campfire and the breath of their horses.
When I wake up an hour later, I take the long walk back to the car and get on the road to Donny’s, stopping at a grocery store bakery on the way.
________
Turquoise paint chipping off of the motel’s façade reveals the original pink. I pull into the spot in front of his room. Next door, shades open, and then they close.
“Donny,” I yell, standing outside his door.
“Who is it?”
“Mia.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I have something for you.” My hands are full, so my knock is a kick. I kick three times, hard.
“Go away,” he says.
“Didn’t you hear me? I have something for you.”
“I don’t care what you got. You’re dead to me.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“When I call someone my friend, I mean it. You—you betrayed me.” He’s shouting now. “You was s’posed to be different!”
“From what?”
“Don’t be a goddamn smart ass.”
“I’m serious.”
“From everyone. You understood me. You came over. You drank my bourbon in my house and I told you ‘bout my wife. And you betrayed me.”
“Let me in.”
“You know what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Goddamn. . .you’re…goddamn bitch. Right.”
“That’s not nice. Are you drinking?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m some damn kid.”
“Don’t act like one.”
There are a few seconds of silence, then, “I have a gun.”
“Oh. Well, are you going to shoot me?”
“No.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“They called the police on me, but they couldn’t take my gun. They got no right.”
“Who called the police?”
“John.”
“Who’s John?”
“He’s in room six. He came over and saw the gun and called the police, told ‘em I was goin’ to shoot myself. But I’ve got a license.”
I kick the door again. “Donny, just let me in.”
“Door’s open.”
“My hands are full.”
“With what?”
“Just open the goddamn door!”
He opens it and peers outside. “You alone?”
I push past him into a smoke haze and he slams the door behind me. He has plants, now. Vibrant and well cared for. And a jar filled with water to feed a tied bundle of alstroemerias.
He looks out the window. “Can’t trust no one out there.” He follows me to the table where I am setting down my things: his cake, the box that was in my trunk, the bottle of wine. “What’s that?” He points at the cake in the plastic pan.
“It’s a cake.”
“I see it’s a goddamn cake.” He picks it up, then sets it back down and takes off the cover. “For me?”
“This, too.” I slide the box across the table. He leans forward to grab it and staggers.
“Donny…”
“Doctor Donaldson,” he says and slams his palm into his chest. His eyes are flat, dark.
“Do you drink wine?”
He shakes his head. “What’re you…? When’ve you seen me drink wine? Bourbon! Bourbon, bourbon.”
He makes his way to the rear of the room and brings back two glasses, one full, the other half full. I take mine and sit in one of the chairs at the table. He sits in the other. Behind him, a young spider plant gets light through the window.
“How long are you going to live here?”
“As long as I got to. Why? What’s the matter with it?”
“Nothing,” I say, and he laughs.
“Nothin’!” he says. “I was just playin’ with you. This place is a crackhead shithole. You know. Next door, guy sells crack. Whores come day and night for it so much I can’t get sleep unless it’s durin’ the day, but they come even then. It’s just that I’m so tired by the time two o’clock comes ‘round that I can’t stay awake.” He picks at the plastic tray under the cake with his fingernail. “I don’t know, though. Yeah, as long as I need to, I guess. Wife ain’t comin’ back.” He drags his sleeve under his nose. “Won’t do it. I tried. I called her and wrote her a letter, and…”
I look around now and then while he’s talking, impressed with the plants, which are healthier and sturdier than anything I could ever grow. The pepper plant is already dyi—
I hold my breath when I see it—the smooth, pristine snow on the driveway is unmistakable—tucked behind the chair.
“…says I drink too much, but what’s she want? I didn’t drink this much before, and I told her if we got back together I’d quit it all. I swear I would. What, you don’t believe me?”
“No. Sure.”
“What’re you lookin’—” He turns, sees it, and jumps out of his chair. “You didn’t call back. I told you I had somethin’ for you.”
“I thought maybe it would be a free TV Guide.”
He lifts the canvas. “Why would I give you that?” He carries it over and sets it in front of me. “What, you think I’m goin’ to stand here and hold it up for you? Take it.”
I take it.
“Almost didn’t give it to you after what happened. Didn’t know what to do with it, though, since I already took it back from that place even though they said they had somebody interested. They get a commission, you know. Fifteen and a half percent.”
“What did they say?
“I don’t care! It’s my goddamn painting. Wait,” he says. He slides off his chair and crawls to the bed, reaching underneath to pull out his drawing of me. “Take this, too.” He rests it against the other and sits down again. “Read it.”
I check the back for a message.
“No, no. The front.” He reaches out for it. “It’s on the—on the front!”
“Okay.” I slap his hand away. “Christ.”
A note spreads across the chalk-streaked strands of my hair in looped, elegant writing: “I love you today—and pray for you tomorrow.” His signature is a scribble.
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“I ain’t got no use for a picture of you.”
“I mean, for both of them.”
“Yeah. You’re welcome.” Donny turns his cake and looks at me and smiles. And there, nineteen years old, there he is. In there somewhere, always, but so quick to leave. So quick he’s already gone.
“First, this.” I hand him the wrapped box and he tears at the paper, swipes it to the floor. He pulls out a clear plastic cube with ‘USA’ floating in the middle, each letter made of air bubbles the size of pin-pricks. He raises it to eye level and turns it in a circle, reads the letters, then sets it down.
He holds out his hand to shake mine, and when I give it to him he squeezes, releases.
“Now this.” I nudge the cake. I get up and walk over to him, lower to my knees on the floor in front of him. I spread my arms the way Jake does, and Donny hesitates, then leans into me. Over his shoulder I say, “Welcome home,” and his fingers tense and curl to clutch my back and his chin presses hard into my shoulder. “Thank—” he says, but the rest gets caught somewhere. He pulls back just enough to cup my face in his hands and pushes my bangs away from my eyes.
“You are my angel.” His thumb strokes my cheek and he kisses me.
His mouth is unexpectedly soft.
There should be something I feel, right now. Anger, embarrassment, disgust. Thrill. But all I notice is his mustache pricking my upper lip and that I’m trying hard to pretend he has the long hair, the torn jeans. That he’s even younger than I am.
Before too long, he pulls away and falls back into his chair. “What the hell’re you doin’?”
“Me?”
“What the hell—what the hell was…?” He brushes his hair off his forehead.
I say, “What was what?”
“Oh, you think I’m that drunk? Think you can trick me?”
“Let’s have some cake.” I look for something to cut it with, but he has no utensils. I settle for a sturdy envelope, unopened, an attorney’s address in the upper left corner. “I would have put something more on it—a decoration, something about where you were specifically—but I don’t know any of it.”
He rubs his foot on the floor. “You do somethin’ nice for me and I tell you it’s nice and now you think I want somethin’ from you. Because I kissed you.”
“Forget the kiss. I don’t think you want anything from me.”
“Bullshit.” He shakes his head. “Bullshit.” He looks at my glass. “You ain’t had a drink. Why’re you bein’ such a little girl?”
“Donny. Can you please just be nice?”
He lights a cigarette. “I don’t know what the hell just happened.” He looks through the smoke at his cake, then back at me. “You got me a cake,” he says, jabbing his cigarette into the space between us. He tilts his head and looks at me, his face softer. “I love you.”
I smile and take a taste of the bourbon, just a layer to numb my lips.
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